Pandora Rolls out the Next Generation of Its Artist Marketing Platform

Pandora (NYSE:P), the go-to music source for fans and artists, today revealed the next generation of its Artist Marketing Platform (AMP), a powerful evolution of Pandora's unique suite of marketing tools that includes Artist Audio Messages, Featured Tracks and AMPcast. The redesigned platform makes it even easier and faster for artists - emerging to megastar - to grow an audience, track progress and connect with fans on Pandora.

In addition to providing valuable data about how an artist's music is performing on Pandora, AMP now features a dynamic feed of an artist's campaign activity as well as performance metrics and suggestions for new campaigns. AMPcast, in limited release since it launched earlier this year, is now open to all artists. Its new features give artists the ability to geotarget Artist Audio Messages, share these messages via social networks or save draft messages to edit at a later time - all from the Pandora mobile app.

"Our mission has always been to offer every artist the opportunity to find their audience on Pandora - a fan base of more than 78 million of the most engaged listeners in streaming music today," said Sara Clemens, chief operating officer and head of Pandora's Music Maker Group. "AMP eliminates guesswork, helps break new artists, surfaces new music from established artists and creates new revenue streams."

To promote singles, albums, shows or tours, artists can design and schedule integrated campaigns on AMP leveraging a combination of tools that drive listener engagement:

* Artist Audio Messages: Let artists record a short audio message, customize the message with images or calls to action, set it to play before or after a specific track and geotarget fans in specific markets.

*Featured Tracks: Give artists the ability to promote a new single widely across Pandora and receive real-time feedback such as thumbs up or down and station creations to gauge listener affinity.

*Ticketfly Integration: Prompts artists to promote shows at Ticketfly venues via Artist Audio Messages, automatically provides a "click to buy" link and suggests dates for airing and geotargeting the message based on the event location.

"AMP is proof of Pandora's commitment to improving the lives of musicians and supporting our industry. It's the most targeted and efficient set of promotional tools available and it helps us reach a massive audience. The latest updates actually make it even better and we will use it across our roster to let fans know of initiatives and to break new artists," said Avery Lipman, president and co-founder of Republic Records. "Ariana Grande recorded a series of Artist Audio Messages to support the release of Dangerous Woman that encouraged listeners to preorder the album. The click through rate - a staggering 8.1 percent - was five to seven times what we saw for social and paid channels and drove significant preorders. Other emerging bands like Marian Hill are also using AMP and are thrilled with the results they've seen with products like AMPcast."

Over the past two years, Pandora has invested in helping artists connect with their fans at scale. The company introduced AMP in late 2014, Artist Audio Messages in early 2015 and AMPCast in early 2016. Pandora also acquired Next Big Sound to help artists quantify the value of other channels including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook and this August, introduced three Next Big Sound charts: Trendsetters, Predictions and Top Spins. To date, more than 6,000 artists are using AMP to make critical career decisions and more than 5,400 Artist Audio Messages have been heard by Pandora listeners nearly half a billion times.